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Game lays golden egg
Still from Untitled Goose Game. Photo: Supplied
Viral success of video
game prompts calls for
greater investment.
By Dallas Bastian
I
t’s a lovely morning in the village … and
you are a horrible goose.
That’s how the creators of Untitled
Goose Game described their work in a
simple trailer for the game. Fast forward
to its September release and it has topped
Nintendo Switch’s UK and Australian
download charts.
One of its creators, games designer
Michael McMaster, is an RMIT PhD
researcher, and the university interviewed
him about the game’s success.
“Since we put our first trailer online in
late 2017, there’d been a lot of excitement
around the game, but we’d always tried to
be as pessimistic as possible in the lead-up
to its release,” he said.
“We weren’t prepared for the game’s wild
success.”
People think game development means
you get to play games all day, but they’re
wrong – it means you talk about geese.
Michael McMaster@mjmcmaster,
11 Aug 2016
Untitled Goose Game was developed by
Melbourne-based independent developer
House House and funded by Film Victoria.
And its success has led to calls for more
investment in game creation.
To move through the levels, users must
complete a list of tasks – almost all hinged
on making life tough for the inhabitants
of a quaint English town. The tasks range
from stealing a farmer’s hat to tripping over
a bespectacled child to make him wear the
wrong glasses. Honking as they go, players
unlock new parts of the town in which to
cause more havoc.
Or, as the University of Melbourne’s
Associate Professor Kenny McAlpine
described it in Pursuit: “Imagine Quentin
Tarantino directing Buster Keaton
as Beatrix Potter’s Mr McGregor in a
slapstick avian revenge flick and you’ll be
getting close.”
Explaining the new age of game
creation, the Melbourne enterprise fellow in
interactive composition said: “We now have
a generation of creative professionals who
have grown up as digital natives around
the technologies and the audio-visual
vocabulary and grammar of gaming.
“And what of those kids — kids like me —
who grew up playing that first generation
of video games? Well, as much as I am
loathe to admit it, we are all now middle-
aged. We’re the policymakers, educators,
publishers and commissioners.”
Despite this, lecturer in games and
interactivity at Edith Cowan University
Luke Brook explained in a piece for
The Conversation that the Australian
government is still reluctant to support the
video game industry.
Brook said Untitled Goose Game’s
success is an indication of what the
Australian games industry is capable of with
funding and support.
“The popularity of Untitled Goose
Game comes from a perfect confluence
of factors: a stylistic and playful art style,
slapstick humour, an adaptive soundtrack,
logical puzzle solving, and the high level
of accessibility and short learning curve
due to the simplistic control scheme,”
he explained.
“The game’s success shows great
things can come from investing in small,
independent teams.”
And McCaster, whose PhD work looked
at the surge of video game exhibitions
and other programming within museums,
said there’s still a lot of uncharted gaming
territory to explore.
“Games in the general sense are
extremely old, but video games as a distinct
audio-visual medium are still very young, so
there’s a huge amount of white space for
new ideas to be tested,” he explained.
“Not that we’re making wildly
experimental games ourselves, but I think
it says a lot that ‘a game played from the
perspective of a horrible goose’ seems so
novel and interesting to people.” ■
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